a personal-public notebook about human development(s) ... by michaela raab

Saturday, 23 October 2010

Development speak in many tongues - look it up here

Yesterday in Bujumbura, friends described to me how they had managed to reduce the incidence of particularly violent forms of forced marriage involving abduction and gang rape in their home region, up in the High Plateaux of Southern South Kivu (DRC). It was extremely enlightening, but also sort of surreal because of their generous use of development jargon. Terms such as "baseline assessment", "participatory survey", "target groups", "sensitisation" and "awareness-raising" punctuated every sentence, hiding to some extent what really happened.
I am not fond of jargon. But in some situations, e.g. when applying for donor funds, you need to throw in a few appropriate pieces of jargon, and if it's just to convey an impression of competency. In an attempt to set standards for the use of such terms, the OECD Development assistance committee published a Glossary of Key Terms in Evaluation and Results-Based Management in 2002. You can find its original English, French and Spanish version here. Unfortunately, the glossary is still little known, even though handy Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, Kiswahili, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish and Turkish versions are available.

I would encourage you to try out these links and spread them widely. These glossaries do help to foster understanding through a more accurate use of terms.

The glossaries are so well hidden that it has taken me more than an hour to find an OECD-DAC evaluation page that lists its translations. On the way there, I stumbled across an amazing array of compilations of multilingual glossaries in all kinds of disciplines, for example 100 search engines, which recommends a glossary on aeronautics, among many others. It felt like looking up something in an encyclopaedia and getting lost for the rest of the afternoon.

Back on-line!

Apologies to all those who have tried to post comments since mid-2017! I have been too terribly busy to review and authorise the comments in good time. (This blog is a free-time venture after all.)

Meanwhile, the European Commission's General Data Protection Regulation has come into force and it has become complicated to display comments. To stay on the safe side, I have deleted all comments ever posted to this blog. I am very sorry about that, because I have enjoyed this form of conversation. And I do hope you will enjoy reading future posts all the same.

About me

I am a consultant with some 30 years of experience in development - in particular, monitoring & evaluation, facilitation, training and applied research with a range of organisations and in many places around the world. I live in Berlin and work in several languages.This blog is a free time venture - so please bear with typos and occasional long waits between the posts.

Total Pageviews

Disclaimer

This is my personal blog, which I use to share thoughts, informations and news, based on my personal knowledge and perceptions. I do my best to ensure accuracy and truthfulness but cannot be held legally responsible for any content on this site, which is meant for informal exchange only. As to the links offered here: the responsibility for content on these links remains with those who run the respective sites.